Posted on 09/12/2013 10:01:20 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Saab seeks collaboration with Boeing to sell Gripen fighter jets to U.S.
Swedish arms manufacturer Saab is said to be close to a cooperation with American airplane maker Boeing to offer JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets to the U.S. Air Force's educational TX.
The collaboration is expected to be announced within "weeks rather than months", according to US air industry magazine Aviation Week, citing informed sources.
Saab is apparently confident that the two companies will be able to undercut the cost of the closest rival contender, the Lockheed Martin/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50, it said.
The news came the same day as Saab's proposed sale of 22 Gripen fighter jets to Switzerland won approval from the lower house of parliament with the Swedish defence firm confident the $3.4 billion deal would go through next year.
"We are very pleased with it but it is still a continuing political process that is going on in Switzerland," Tomas Samuelsson, head of Saab's Europe and Greater Middle East region, told Reuters at a defence exhibition in London.
given we have f15s, f16s, f18s, f22s, f35s, do we really need another country’s fighter?
I think they use these for pilots to train against rather than a front line aircraft. You don’t want pilots always seeing F-16’s
Couldn’t we starting building F-5’s again as trainers?
Grippen is a superb aircraft.
That T-50 looks like a hybrid between an F-16 and a T-38
It does, doesn’t it?
See, when an Golden Eagle and a Falcon fall in love....
I totally flubbed that
You mean T-38s. From what I understand, 38s are good for basic flight training but have little characteristics in common with modern fighters. They don’t seem to be in any hurry to replace the 38s.
Here’s the choices
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-X_program
Was known in the industry that US manufactures don’t put a high priority on building trainers due to a lower profit margin per aircraft.
>>>The martin-Korean T-50<<<
Looks like a carbon copy of a Yak-130 trainer.
It seems like after the Cold War the roles are reversed and it is LM who are picking Soviet technology (F-35 based on Yak-141 propulsion principles too).
i thought our t-50s were good trainer jets.
The two fill different slots with some overlap.
The T-50 is a trainer aircraft which can do an acceptable job for combat maneuver training while the Gripen is a full on fighter aircraft (good enough to be purchased as a current production front line fighter) that is economical and forgiving enough to be used as a supersonic capable trainer.
The basic Gripen is 20 some years old so the tooling and development costs have been amortized to make it cost competitive, Saab can get economies of scale if they run production concurrent with the Swiss order and it is a very well proven and reliable aircraft with outstanding performance
T38 is a great trainer
The F5 was a great aircraft.Simple and cheap to operate. and it could do everything.
And the skids will be greased by the GE 414 derived Volvo Engine no doubt given GE's gravitas with the Administration. Tanget to this is I miss the days of Northrup and Grumman ( not NG today ) and McDonnell Douglas's etc and competition. None of the Corp Governance will take the risk were as maybe in the 60's a fighter-trainer like this would have had a ton of entries going after the contract.
But it's a SAAB - supposed to be good in the snow...
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